


The Old Man Outside Maria

by Spidernancy



Series: Bad Endings for Humanity [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Bad Ending, Crossover, Gen, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-31
Updated: 2013-10-31
Packaged: 2017-12-31 01:44:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1025828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spidernancy/pseuds/Spidernancy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a scouting expedition that goes much further from the walls than usual, the crew finds a cave with signs of recent habitation, and piles and piles of the oddest remains. </p><p>A mystery crossover one shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Old Man Outside Maria

When they ducked into the cave, no one quite knew what to say. Bat droppings were expected. Perhaps a lethargic creature, holed away for the day and infuriated by their loud noises and foul smells. But Sasha had insisted the muss of tracks out front weren't from bears or badgers or wolves, or even small titans. Not many were sure what to believe. Personally Eren had thought that it looked like something had just dropped its rear to the ground and skid around like it was trying to alleviate the runs. The dirt was just swirls and dents to him.

Lighting a torch had only proved Sasha to be the hero of their small expedition. Hanji had whooped and kissed her cheeks, and Armin was openly gaping. 

Here, there was a small fire pit, loosely defined by rounded stones and brittle husks of wood, burned to ashes and still stuck in form. There were furs lain down with jagged edges, clumsy cutting from a sharp knife, slightly rotted from the damp. A set of roughly hewn torches leaned against the driest patch of wall. And all this five kilometers south of the remains of Wall Maria.

Whoever lived here was doing so before the wall fell. Making a home amongst the Titans.

"Could this be a rendezvous point for the shifters?" Armin wondered aloud. 

"It's for one person," Levi announced. He brushed the ridge of the bedding with the toe of his boot, curling his lip at the smell. Eren had a feeling he'd be polishing those boots spotless later, and prayed for Levi to stop prodding the smelly furs. "There's a big dent in the middle. Some fat shit had to be sleeping here often, or the furs wouldn't lay so flat."

"How do you know he's fat?" Connie asked.

"Or a he, either," Hanji pointed out. 

Eren cringed a little when Levi kicked the furs again, turning them over and unveiling shriveled and crusted strings of meat. He'd probably be polishing those boots later. "By looking at this dent. It's appalling. What does he eat that he's gotten so fat?"

"Maybe venison?" Sasha was shivering with delight at whatever imaginary fancies passed over her tongue and Eren, who had never tried venison, was convinced that maybe the next time they passed a deer he should push for a quick hunt. 

"Could they be close by?"

"Everyone, over here!"

Armin had gone further in alone. His face, split into a grin that was positively giddy, was lit with ochres from the torch. He waved it closer to the wall and unveiled strange markings, and small piles of stones below.

Eren drew closer. They were not stones.

"Bones!" he declared. The entire crew was with them in moments, save for a few senior members that Levi had ordered to stand guard at the mouth. 

It wasn't gross. They were ancient by now, these old things. Eren could stomach looking at the fractured piles of human remains without his stomach turning or being overcome with rage. There were several, each set into neat piles quite separate from the others and marked with a faded black symbol above. They looked like they might have been painted on in tar.

"What are these? Graves?" Eren turned to Armin for an explanation. 

"I don't understand," Connie said. "This one's just got a number four above it."

"Eh? So does this one," Hanji said, squinting. "Judging from the damage done to the bones I'd say this man was burned somehow. Here, let me see the others! This is astonishing!"

Eren exchanged a look with Levi. The Corporal looked uneasy. Perturbed, and not just by the mess. "The remains are old, then?"

"They are!" Hanji hummed with a nod. She had materialized by Connie's side and was tilting an oddly long and twisted bone back and forth in the torch light. "Hmmm, the top of this one looks like it belonged to a femur, but the end is distended and twisted. Like it was pulled out of shape. Maybe it was a mold of a bone, and not a real one at all. But then these look like they've been bitten by a Titan all the same..."

"How old?" demanded Levi.

"Hmm." She snuggled closer to Connie and snatched a bone from a pile adjacent, where they all seemed perfectly ordinary. That pile was marked with a simple X. "Well, without the proper equipment I can only estimate, but I think maybe these are hundreds of years old. Or a thousand, or more. They must have been dug up sometime. Not fossilized, far too recent for that, but they’re from before the walls for certain."

"Then why has this bastard got them dug up in here?" Levi barked. 

Eren crouched low and felt over the weird twisted bone Hanji had been inspecting. The end tapered into a spiral, like how those candies in expensive shops swirled around and around a wooden stick base. Lollipops, right? "Maybe...this is a grave. Or there had been a clan here, before the walls. And maybe he was the only one left, or he just found them by accident." He waved the long bone around in the air. "Hanji, can bones melt?"

"No," she was back at his side again. "Which is why this is absolutely _fascinating_. Oi, Levi, I could take this back with me right? If it isn't a mold then I'd like to--"

"Don't waste your time," he ordered. "What could you learn from some deformed old corpse?"

"This one has a tail," Mikasa said quietly. The squad was silent as they crowded around her sample, which wasn't much more than a spine with a few broken ribs still attached, and segments that trailed off and coiled long past where a human's spine would end. They were rock solid, so the coil remained perfectly intact as it was picked up and delicately passed around. When Eren received it he could see that the tip had broken off some long time ago. 

"They might not all be human," Armin said.

"Or they were monsters," muttered one squad member. 

Eren tread a little further, growing steadily more uneasy with the number of piles lining both sides of the cave. The ceiling was getting low so he started to crouch, and there was an increasingly foul smell he could not place. One pile looked like dusty orange scales. Another had just shattered fragments. A jaw. Something glinted unexpectedly. He knelt, throat dry, and reached for what he had thought was a large hand. 

It wasn't flesh at all. Metal. Metal that had rusted over completely, but had been trapped in the shape of a massive hand. Eren turned it over and yelped when it cracked at his touch.

"Eren!" Mikasa called. Several people were running over.

He was gaping at what remained. The weakened, ancient metal had split, and inside was a real hand. The skin was mummified, shriveled and black and hard as stone. 

"It's nothing!" Eren protested. "I think it was a glove...some kind of armor...it just startled me, it broke in my hands."

He passed it to Hanji who was looming over his shoulder now, who took into her grip with great reverence. "Aaah, what a shame, it's all ruined."

"I'm sorry," Eren insisted.

"No, the rust! But you see here, this edge, at the wrist. That’s surely a bite mark!"

"You...sons of bitches..."

No one moved. Sasha was trembling. Their attention was diverted to the low, dark crevice where the cave tapered into crawl space. Shadows sheltered the thing that was housed there, but Eren saw a dark blot shift. Heard a scrape against the ground.

"You fuck off..." The voice was low and breathless, gravelly.

"There's a person!" Sasha squeaked, pointing and babbling madly. "There's a person under there, I knew it! I knew it!"

"Is he trapped?" 

Several torches at once were swung under to take a closer look. Eren covered his mouth. 

There was an old man lying on his belly, face pressed into the floor and naked, from the looks of it. The smell was his fetid, unwashed body, rubby from the cave floor and unattended to for days. Weeks maybe. His skin was pallid white and hung from the bones with a blanket's limpness. There was so little muscle left that Eren might have passed him over as a corpse.

"It's alive?" Connie said, aghast. The man grumbled something into the floor and broke off coughing and gagging on phlegm. 

"Get him out," Levi ordered. "I have questions for him." Eren looked back at him, unsure, knowing what he must be thinking. The only people who could live outside of the walls were shifters. If this man knew anything, then he was invaluable.

"He's almost dead, though! What if we accidentally--"

Mikasa was already on her knees. "Connie. Shut up and pull."

The two tried, panting, to yank the man out. Both of them had bulging eyes and open mouths. "He's heavy," Mikasa muttered breathlessly, "Eren?"

Unhappily, Eren helped her by taking a hold of the man's squishy, moist forearm while she held the wrist. He cringed and tried not to lose his breakfast, the smell so much worse up close and nauseated by the squish of too malleable flesh under his fingers. How long had he been trapped under there? 

It took five of them by the end to do the job. It was baffling, as the man was nothing but skin and bones and he wasn't too much taller than Corporal Levi from the looks of it. He was frosted with wiry white hairs all over his body, liver spots abound. They had him rolled over and covered in a cloak, the old man gnattering and cursing all the while. Armin was soaking a rag in water and dabbing his face with it, jaw clenched.

Levi was unmoved by the display. "Hey. Old Man. Who are you and why are you out here?"

The old man spat, hitting a mortified Armin in the face, who squeaked and lurched back to rub his cheek with his sleeve. The man cackled and squirmed on the rocky cave floor. "Far from home, ain't ya? You're all walled up and safe there, ain't no reason to come here and touch my things."

"Your things? These old bones?" Hanji asked.

"Fuck you." 

He wasn't a very polite old man.

"How have you survived out here?" Levi asked. 

"I ain't survived." He was cackling again. "Been chewed up and spit out too much. You all should get back to your wall, fucking idiots."

"Chewed up?" Sasha asked, biting her lip. There was perturbed murmuring amongst the squad, but Eren paid them no mind. He drew closer, grabbing the cloth Armin had abandoned and was now too spooked to pick up again. 

"Excuse me? Sir?" Eren asked. He patted at the man's head with the cloth and determinedly ignored the way the man's lip curled. His teeth were an oddly brilliant white. "Were you hiding in this cave from the Titans?"

The old man's eyes, milky at the edges but rolling around with a perturbing alertness, settled on the figures of Hanji and Levi, crouching over his head from behind. He started chuckling again, and limply, laboriously raised an arm. It was more like a fish flopping than a motion with purpose, flinging his hand up and jutting out a finger to point ever so briefly at Hanji's hips and 3DMG before it fell to the side again. "You're still...heh heh...you're still using that shit, huh? Pete would be proud. Didn't help him none. Snatched out of the air. Snatched out of the air like a goddamn fly, like it was nothing..." He trailed off into mumbles no one could decipher. Eren's heart seized when he realized the sudden sparkling in his eyes was born from tears. Thick tears that trickled out of the sides of his eyes and rolled down into his ghostly white hair. "Stupid sons of bitches."

"Pete..." Armin was out of his shock. He swiveled, pushing Sasha's torch arm at the nearest bone pile against her protests. It was an ordinary pile, but the symbol above it was a circle, four straight lines spiking out on each side. "Corporal, I think..."

The old man sniffled, nostrils flared wide. Then he stiffened. Worried he might be on the verge of a fit, being so old and possibly in shock, Eren frowned and leaned closer. "Sir?"

The hand that had taken so long to point out the gear was up again, faster than before, and Eren heard a clean, metallic _snikt_ before he felt the blades in his chest. He hollered, the cry echoing off of the cave walls, and his blood drizzled over the old man's shoulder as he growled and turned his head closer to face Eren, eyes wide and livid. 

"You've got yourselves a _Titan_ over here," he rumbled murderously. 

Mikasa moved like lightning. Her sword descended on the arm that was still attached to the blades, as Levi swooped in and yanked Eren off. Eren screamed as the knives came loose. His nerves were on fire, his front already soaking with blood now that the wounds were open and free, but the steaming started and though it burned he began to shake with relief. Even his organs healed. He knew his heart had been hit, his chest seized tight already from the inactivity, but the steam swirled out of him and the next second he could feel a faint thump, and he knew he would live. 

Everyone else was shouting, and Mikasa was standing over them pale and wide eyed. Eren was still dizzy, but he blinked and let Levi cradle him against his chest and put his focus back on the scene, pushing the searing agony away as best as he could. 

Mikasa's sword had dented. There was a perfect curve where it had hit the bone. The old man's arm was cut wide open and bleeding, but there was only silver where there ought to be ivory bone. And still poised in the air, where he had thrust his knives into Eren's chest, was his clenched and trembling fist. Eren had to blink twice to assure himself his own tears of pain weren't distorting the view.

There were three blades, long and glinting, emerging from the man's fist, each perfectly parallel. There was no handle. He wasn't holding anything, nor were there any rings around his fingers to hold them in place. The blades were sprouting out from the skin between his knuckles. The blades were in his own hand.

The man wheezed, and drew his arm to his chest. The blades retracted into the thin slits from which they had emerged, and those sealed together into seamless, flimsy skin. He wasn't steaming like Eren, but the cut on his arm was slowly cinching together, the blood ceasing its flow and the tissues laboriously melding to close the gap.

Armin spoke with a tremor in his voice. "I've read stories...I thought they were fairy tales, but..."

Hanji finished his thoughts, touching the old man's clean shoulder in awe. "So...we've been terribly rude, I see." She licked her lips and quivered. "Disturbing the rest of the fabled Wolverine."

The old man clucked his tongue and just watched his arm stitch itself back together. His tears were running a heavy trail over his temples, and he gave a miserable sob. "Slower," he said, nodding weakly. "That's a good sign."


End file.
